I’m on sabbatical!
I will confess that a part of me feels faintly guilty about the entire arrangement. The Table extends to its pastors a policy more generous than anything I have encountered elsewhere: a full month of sabbatical for every year of service rendered, accruable to three months across every three-year span. I recently became aware of a pastor who, after twenty years in ministry, is finally taking his first sabbatical this summer—a grand total of three whole weeks, which is precisely the kind of arithmetic that reveals how extraordinary The Table’s own arrangement remains.
My first sabbatical was in 2019, after nine years of ministry, with children aged three and one, and in the immediate aftermath of my brother’s death the year before, a grief I had scarcely begun to process. By any reasonable measure, I was way past ready.
The second came in 2023, once I had helped carry The Table through the disorientation of the pandemic, reconstructed our entire governance from the studs, and completed our merger with Resurrection City. I was way past ready that time as well, and on both occasions I dragged myself toward the finish line and collapsed the moment I crossed it.
This time, however, only three years have passed, and I find I am not limping toward the threshold. I do not feel burnt out, and I am not crossing off Sundays in anticipation of the moment I can finally stop. By the math I have always implicitly trusted, I have not “earned” this particular rest.
That arithmetic, the instinctive calculation of whether I have suffered sufficiently to deserve an interruption, is precisely the habit I need to stop.
Our culture clings to a stubborn conviction about rest: that a person must purchase rest through exhaustion. You run yourself into the ground, you demonstrate your depletion convincingly, and only then are you granted the reward. We treat exhaustion like a ticket we turn in for redemption. I have completed that transaction twice already, and I would rather not construct an entire existence in which authentic rest arrives only after I have broken myself against the work.
The Sabbath described in Scripture was never structured as compensation for the depleted. It appeared on the seventh day, woven into the ordinary architecture of the week as a recurring rhythm rather than an emergency rescue. God pronounced the creation good and afterward rested, not from any exhaustion but because the work itself had reached its completion. Work was never intended to possess us.
So this third sabbatical proceeds according to everything the first two managed to teach me. I am not writing a book, nor constructing a discipleship curriculum, nor preparing for a marathon. The version of me that habitually converts a season of rest into another anxious productivity sprint is permitted, on this occasion, to remain on the bench.
Instead, I intend to be present with my family. That’s the entirety of the plan.
Will I read during these three months? Almost certainly. Will I write? In all likelihood, though I refuse to assign either pursuit as an obligation. For most of my adult life the accounting has consisted of sermons preached, Sundays executed, classes taught, and meetings attended, a ledger I tabulate every single week. For the coming three months that ledger simply closes, and whatever happens happens.
I do have a handful of modest ambitions, though I am holding them with a deliberately open hand. I would like to finish Deep Space Nine, to keep working through the accumulating stack of science fiction I have collected, including Dungeon Crawler Carl and The Expanse and the Star Wars High Republic novels, to read a stack of nonfiction alongside several classics, to finish my devotional book, Read It Like You’re Free, and to resume the abandoned discipline of running.
But none of that constitutes a goal so much as a catalogue of things I might enjoy, an altogether different proposition.
I will return in the fall, and the work will still be waiting for me, as it always is. For the present, however, I am deliberately stepping off the stage while the tank still registers half full, curious to discover what it might feel like to rest before I am wrecked.
I suspect it will feel something like grace. I will let you know.
